Then, they can determine when they should be going to bed and waking up for optimal health. Getting the right amount of sleep can help prevent disease, boost immunity, and improve mental health.
Still, many of us are not getting enough sleep. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC estimate that about one-third of adults consistently do not get the sleep that they need. Building a healthy sleep pattern may require tweaking the schedule or lifestyle. While this can be challenging at first, the benefits of proper sleep are worth the effort.
Though there are general guidelines, some people need more sleep than others, due to their lifestyle, any health conditions, and their genetic makeup. The National Sleep Foundation NSF recommend that people of different ages get the following amounts of sleep every 24 hours:.
The following chart can help a person figure out when they need to be going to bed to get 8 hours of sleep a night. The NSF report that, on average, people take 10—20 minutes to fall asleep. The calculations below assume that a person needs 15 minutes, but if someone tends to take longer, they should adjust their bedtime accordingly. To be properly rested, the body must go through several sleep cycles per night, including rapid eye movement REM sleep and non-REM sleep.
If the body does not go through these stages several times a night, the person may wake feeling fatigued and unfocused. A review of 30 studies , for example, found a connection between less sleep and weight gain in children and adults. Another study found that nurses who slept 5 hours or fewer were more likely to have obesity than those who slept 7 hours on average. Health Brain. The people who need very little sleep. Share using Email. By Helen Thomson 7th July Is it true that some people need only a few hours of sleep?
Helen Thomson talks to a woman whose genes might hint at how we all could survive on less shuteye. She went to bed around midnight and woke at 4am feeling completely alert. Why sleep is so important is still a bit of a mystery. I always feel great when I wake up - Abby Ross. Take a shortcut Fu has subsequently sequenced the genomes of several other families who fit the criteria of short-sleepers. The most effective way to improve your sleep is to fix your wake-up time in the morning.
Around the BBC. The biggest question is how you feel when you get various amounts of sleep. Sleep deprivation is a real thing for some, especially as work and life stress builds up. A sleep study showed that sleep deprivation doubled the odds of making placekeeping errors and tripled the number of lapses in attention.
Sleep and mental health are closely connected, with sleep disorders contributing to depression and anxiety. Sleep is one of the most important factors in our overall health. When you fall asleep, your brain and body go through several cycles of sleep.
Each cycle includes four distinct stages. It takes, on average, about 90 minutes to go through each cycle. Six full cycles are about 9 hours of sleep. Ideally, you want to wake up at the end of a sleep cycle instead of in the middle of it. You usually feel more refreshed and energized if you wake up at the end of a sleep cycle.
Sleep is crucial for many reasons. The condition first appears in literature at the end of the 19th Century, at the same time as accounts of segmented sleep disappear. The idea that we must sleep in a consolidated block could be damaging, he says, if it makes people who wake up at night anxious, as this anxiety can itself prohibit sleeps and is likely to seep into waking life too. Russell Foster, a professor of circadian [body clock] neuroscience at Oxford, shares this point of view. But the majority of doctors still fail to acknowledge that a consolidated eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
But sleep has been ignored in medical training and there are very few centres where sleep is studied," he says. Jacobs suggests that the waking period between sleeps, when people were forced into periods of rest and relaxation, could have played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally.
In many historic accounts, Ekirch found that people used the time to meditate on their dreams. So the next time you wake up in the middle of the night, think of your pre-industrial ancestors and relax. Lying awake could be good for you. Listen to the programme here. Craig Koslofsky - University of Illinois. Image source, Other. Image source, bbc. Roger Ekirch says this engraving by Jan Saenredam is evidence of activity at night.
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